Phthursday Musings: 400, 50/50, 10

The intention this week was to write just about 400 - and that’s still the main part of this. But I decided to split that in half, and throw in a little about some other numbers. Have fun!

I’ve mentioned over time that I keep logs. I log what books I’ve read, what major sports events I’ve been to, what races I’ve run. I even log gas receipts for our cars.

The most meticulous log is the concert log. I’ve been maintaining it in various forms for many years, having switched over to using a Google Sheet a while ago so I could also access it on my phone. I scoured all of the available sources I could - especially the depths of my memory - to reconstruct the who, when, and where of shows I’ve seen, dating back to, at age four, when I saw Merle Haggard at the Rock County Fair.

If I went somewhere for the primary purpose of seeing the musicians listed, it qualifies for inclusion on the list. (The closest I come to “cheating” is the inclusion of nine shows over time where I was in one of the bands that played the show.) While I might be missing a couple of shows, I think I’ve done a very thorough reconstruction.

The event of bringing this up is that a couple weekends ago, at my advanced aged, I managed to drive into Chicago for three shows in four nights, with the last - the glorious Pulp at the Aragon - being my 400th logged concert.

On a work trip last week, a colleague asked me how my free time was spent, and speculated it involved music because I’ve adopted an approach of splicing music references into monthly PowerPoint presentations. And as I thought about this, I found it interesting that from the perspective of my co-workers, music is my thing… whereas from the perspective of people I know in my immediate community, sports is my thing… and among people I know for other reasons, politics is my thing.

I knew I wanted to write about the 400 milestone, but wasn’t sure how, if I was going to randomly pick shows to try and reminisce about, or what. What I decided to do here was to pick 10 shows - I front-loaded a bit, so on my list, they’re roughly #10, #20, #30, #50, #100, #150, #200, #250, #300, #400, plus or minus a couple if it helped with the story-telling - and mull a little bit about what all else was happening around me, even when, it would seem, music was (or at least became) the most constant thread.

The first five are here, and the next five will come in another Musings, hopefully next week!

The Who @ Alpine Valley, 7/22/89 (#11)

Quite a way to start off this exercise. The Who at this point had like 12 people on stage instead of 4, and my #1 recollection of this show was that it was insanely loud, and to this day the loudest outdoor show I’ve ever been to, probably by an order of magnitude. I was with my dad, and I think maybe others, but I’m not sure who all. This was the third time I’d been to Alpine Valley - the two previous years he’d taken me to see the Grateful Dead there. This being The Who, I’m not sure what other color to try and provide, though weirdly the song I remember best from the night was “Face the Face”, a solo Pete Townshend from the mid-80s, but The Who punched it up as a hard rocker instead of whatever madness the original was.

I was 12, the summer before 8th grade. Throughout grade school I’d been in a gifted program and didn’t live nearby hardly any classmates. But moving to Winnebago and starting in 7th grade there, I had numerous classmates within a three block radius. That summer was the first time I actually had friends who I saw regularly, and our primary glue at the time was basketball. Music had not quite yet become a dominant aspect of my world. I don’t think I owned any of my own CDs at the time, and any cassettes I had were probably dubs my dad had made of Beatles records. If I had the radio on back then, I was listening to oldies. I also went through a weird classical phase maybe a year later. It only all finally broke open about when I turned 16, and decided to listen pretty much exclusively to local rock radio.

Blue Öyster Cult, Uriah Heep, Nazareth, Wishbone Ash @ MetroCentre, 11/30/93 (#20)

This was only the second show I’d gone to without a parent, which in retrospect is pretty wild, as I was 17, but the thing is, where exactly would we have gone? We didn’t know anything about anything going on anywhere around us unless it hit an arena like this.

Blue Öyster Cult and Nazareth were staples on WXRX at this time, BOC enough so that they’d even get played on triple play weekends because they had three songs in regular rotation. The thing is that nobody knew anything except the hits from any of these bands, which means that we knew nothing about Wishbone Ash and had only a fleeting notion of what Uriah Heep was about.

As it turned out, Uriah Heep was the best band of the night, because they had the best guitar player (Mick Box), and they didn’t come off as a band resting on their laurels. And I’m not damning with faint praise here: Uriah Heep was really good! Wishbone Ash was good, Nazareth was alright, Blue Öyster Cult was one of the those sets where you sit through the stuff you don’t know waiting for the stuff that you do, and that’s cool and all but doesn’t really leave you impressed.

The next day at school we compared notes with our Spanish teacher, who was also at the show, and who expressed confusion over how Nazareth tried to get everyone to sing along with “My White Bicycle”, a song clearly nobody knew, but which, because of that conversation, I at least am destined to never forget.

I guess I forgot to get this sweet shirt that night. Or at least I assume this is a shirt. Maybe it’s a towel. Would this be a sweet towel? Probably not.

For my birthday earlier that month I had gotten among other things a gift certificate to Media Play, the first store of said chain having opened in Rockford a year or so before, and I used that to get the greatest hits of The Doors, and also… Urge Overkill’s Saturation. This month was kind of a catalyst month for me personally in a shift from listening to and acquiring a lot of classic rock, shifting over to what was being called alternative. Nobody else around me had bought Saturation, which I knew almost exclusively from hearing “Sister Havana” on WXRX. This was all a sign of things to come.

Pavement, Dirty Three @ The Rave, 5/24/95 (#30)

This remains an all-time top five show for me. After a year of college and consumption of all sorts of things, this was actually the first indie-rock show I’d never gone to. This was part of a short tour Pavement did after Wowee Zowee came out, before they were going to be on the main stage of Lollapalooza starting the following month. The summer before going to college, I’d gotten a copy of Slanted + Enchanted, and I spent the year revving myself up to the point where, as of the time of this show, Pavement was my favorite band. I didn’t really know anything about the Dirty Three going in.

I had only been home from college for a week. My friend Duvall and I drove up from Winnebago. (The next week, we did the drive again to see R.E.M. Sandwiched between was Memorial Day, and at lease one astute reader might here note that I have quite a story about Memorial Day 1995 and our local rock radio station. But that story is for another time.)

The Dirty Three were - and, hey, still are - an instrumental three piece from Melbourne, with Mick Turner on guitar, Jim White on drums, and the incomparable Warren Ellis on violin. Warren was clean shaven this night in 1995. He was also under the heavy influence of at least one thing he should not have been, and would dedicate songs to “those who are dead” and such. The crowd was thin at this time, so Duvall and I actually laid down on the floor, necks crooked up toward the stage, figuring this was a show meant to be appreciated in such a manner, and I tend to think we were right. The Dirty Three made a remarkable impression upon me that has never faded.

It’s rare when you get to see performers in exactly the right setting, at exactly the right time in their career. This is how it was with Pavement that night. Wowee Zowee to me is the peak of their career, and they were loose and playful, and I’ve seen them several more times since, but that was the best. They closed with an instrument swap and Steve West taking the microphone to belt out “Flux = Rad”.

This was really the show where I first felt like… a rock club is where I want to be. All the time.

Wesley Willis @ some band’s practice space or something, 1/16/97 (#56)

If you don’t already know, it’s so difficult to explain it in a way that could possibly make any sense…

I had run into Wes before, on the landing at the Metro, where he was selling some of his magic marker streetscapes. And I had certainly heard Wes before, as he had a whole lot of CDs available by this point, and had even inexplicably been signed to a major label.

Wes was a 6’6”, 300-plus pound, schizophrenic Black man, who would play the pre-programmed music of a Technics keyboard, and who would sing largely about shows he had seen, and, well, Wesley Willis remains one of my true heroes and inspirations, one of the greatest rock and roll stars that ever was, through sheer force of will, in the face of brutal obstacles I could never begin to process.

You could know all about him, and it would still not prepare you for showing up to some weird little house that some band was using as a practice space on the west side of Bloomington, and walking in and it’s not well lit, and up front the Technics keyboard is set up, and then Wes comes in and sits down and the show just immediately begins, and it’s legitimately enthralling. Like, look, I get it, it sounds like the whole thing is absurd. But it’s not. It’s pure.

I would later on learn more about Wes, what it was like to tour with him, what it was like to try and help him get by. The more I learned, the deeper my appreciation for everything he did. I wish you all could have seen him play.

I’ve long had difficulty finding the right photo of Wes, but tonight I found this, on an Etsy page of all places, and I like it and am sharing it here.

Bottle Rockets @ Lizard’s Lounge, 6/6/98 or so (#100)

On the one hand, I was this total indie-rock dude in college. Except I wasn’t. As music director at WESN, I listened to all kinds of things, and I liked all kinds of things. Among my immediate friends, though, the one thing I leaned into more than any of them was the broad “alternative country” scene.

The Bottle Rockets were, I suppose, kind of a bit player in all that. When 24 Hours a Day had come out in the summer of 1997, although we got a copy at WESN, the label wasn’t pushing it, and they got dropped not long after that. But I really liked the album. And then somehow they managed to show up for a June show in Bloomington at a place I’d never had reason to go to before.

I don’t have as strong a recollection of this show as I think I ought to. What I do remember about the show was how there was a weird silliness to it, because there weren’t too many people there, and it wasn’t really a place known as a rock club, and while I was very familiar with their newest album I didn’t get the impression most anyone else was? And it seemed like it suited those guys to be in a place where things were silly, even though the songs themselves weren’t silly at all.

And yet, seeing them when I did was surprisingly formative for me. To me, they were the absolute best of all of the bands that came out of that scene, or at least the best not named Uncle Tupelo. At the time that they broke up in 2021 - I wrote about it then - they were my favorite band still going. And although I listened to a lot of alternative country, these guys were really more of a throughline to me to country than anyone else. I don’t think I appreciated that then, but I very much do now.

All of those shows are from long enough ago that video from them doesn’t exist, so I’ll offer this instead.

#101 on my list is seeing Swervedriver and Spoon at Mabel’s in Champaign, a week after the Bottle Rockets. It was a strange show, because Swervedriver is a shoegaze band, and Spoon is most definitely not a shoegaze band, and Britt Daniel came out and only played a huge acoustic guitar, and they didn’t seem to be having a great time, and at the door they were just handing out copies of the promotional EP for “30 Gallon Tank”, and I wasn’t sure what to make of it all. It was the first time I saw Spoon and they weren’t that great.

Well, #401 is tomorrow night, and it’ll be the 12th time I see Spoon, who I described to a meeting of my entire company earlier today as “the most consistently great band of the last 25 years”. This is oldest official video I could find, from the 2001 album which changed everything, Girls Can Tell:

I wasn’t intending to write about baseball, but earlier today, Shohei Ohtani posted this line:

6-for-6, 3 HR, 2 2B, 10 RBI, 2 SB

In the process he stole his 50th and 51st bases of the year, and hit his 49th, 50th, and 51st home runs of the year, becoming the first 50/50 man in baseball history.

Depending on which stats you look at, Ohtani is only sixth in the league in Wins Above Replacement, but here is where the advanced stats are not telling the right story. He’s the most valuable player to baseball writ large because whether he is worth as many wins as the next man or not, he is the greatest ongoing story the game has had since Babe Ruth. His greatness elevates the status of the entire game.

You can find all kinds of people tripping over themselves to offer all kinds of superlatives. I’ll put it like this. We’re living in a strange time where nearly every day something even stupider seems to come out in the news, and we can feel numb to all of the existential nonsense. To be vaguely nearing 50 and to be constantly in awe of what a man can do with a sculpted piece of wood in his hands is really quite extraordinary and I choose to savor it.

By the next time I write, our 10 year old will have become an 11 year old, a reality around which I have both very complicated thoughts and also very simple thoughts.

I’d like to offer these:

Part of our very important job is to give this weird kid the opportunity to experience a great deal about the world, so as to better allow him to find his way through it all.

Even with all of the chaos of the universe, I insist that it’s a great time to be alive, and I will do everything in my power to help imbue him with that sentiment.